1）Wedbush Securities分析师Michael Pachter日前表示，他相信社交游戏公司Zynga能够克服当前的用户下滑现象，并在本财年下半年恢复强劲的盈利能力。

zynga1-logo(from redherring.com)

他认为得益于Zynga向原游戏作品加大投入，并不断推出新产品，Zynga股票价格将有所增长。他称Zynga股票是因MAU下滑的影响才会下跌，因为投资者一般都认为MAU数量与收益直接相关，但他认为这种想法存在误区，因为大量玩家并非付费用户，而付费用户一般都会在游戏中投入更多时间。

平均每名Facebook付费用户要经历6-9个月才会开始购买Facebook Credits，无论MAU是否在达到高峰后开始下滑，游戏的营收仍会持续增长。Zynga仍掌握最大规模的Facebook社交游戏用户，其MAU将近第二大开发商的5倍，所以不需要过于担心其目前处境。

2）Unity Technologies日前宣布即将推出更新版游戏开发平台Unity 4，该版本将提高图像保真度，支持DirectX 11，增强版的Flash输出选项，以及基于Linux的游戏开发预览等功能。

unity 4-mecanim(from joystiq.com)

该版本最大的变化是添加了动画工具组件Mecanim（游戏邦注：该公司于去年收购了Mecanim），支持开发者在Unity中创建动画混合效果和状态机。

3）据games.com报道，社交游戏公司RockYou首席执行官Lisa Marino在最近的媒体采访中解释了收购Ryzing的原因，他称在此之前，公司经过重组后自我定位为发行商，并且不再开发内部游戏，但同时也在思考行业的未来走向。他认为玩真钱的游戏将成为未来两年中Facebook最热门的现象。

rewads-based games(from games)

虽然RockYou通过收购掌握了Ryzing旗下博彩游戏《Bingo by Ryzing》，但他们最感兴趣的是Ryzing的开发经验及基于奖励的游戏模式，计划将Ryzing的奖励游戏平台运用于更多游戏类型，并向第三方开发商开放服务。

4）据techcrunch报道，儿童虚拟世界《哈宝旅馆》开发商Sulake首席执行官Paul LaFontaine日前发表博文表示，经历一周的“不当托管性聊天内容”风波之后，《哈宝旅馆》聊天室将向用户重新开放服务。

habbo hotel(from goldicq.com)

他称之前英国Channel 4的曝光报道之后，他们不得不屏蔽网站所有言论，此举给网站造成了“巨大的经济影响”，但并未详细说明具体损失金额（该公司主要通过销售虚拟商品创造收益）；更糟糕的是，此举可能导致一些用户永远离开《哈宝旅馆》。

5）在本周MAU增长最快的Facebook游戏榜单上，FreshPlanet旗下游戏《Song Pop》位居榜首，新增110万MAU，增幅达141%。

中文角色扮演游戏《猛将无双》则位居第二，新增13.6万MAU；SGN游戏《Jewels of the Amazon》位列第三，新增10万MAU，增幅为9%；Manuel Otto游戏《Stick Run》位列第四，新增10万MAU，增幅为2%；CrowdStar游戏《It Girl》位居第五，新增10万MAU，增幅为2%

Top gainers this week-MAU(from AppData)

足球管理游戏《Top Eleven be a Football Manager》位列第六，新增10万MAU，增幅为2%；《FarmVille》位居第七，新增10万MAU，增幅为0.47%；《愤怒的小鸟》位列第九，新增5万MAU，增幅为29%。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）Zynga will overcome ‘misplaced and misguided’ pessimism – analyst

by Mike Rose

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter believes that social games giant Zynga will overcome its recent user declines and rebound to a strong financial performance in the second half of the current fiscal year.

Zynga’s share price has gradually fallen since the company launched its IPO late last year, and earlier this month fell to less than half the value that it was originally priced at.

However, Pachter says that the share price should now increase thanks to increased spending on key older franchises and a slew of new releases, while adding that shareholder pessimism is “misplaced and misguided.”

He notes that Zynga’s shares have been negatively impacted by the decline in monthly active users, as investors appear to believe that the MAU count correlates directly to revenue growth.

“We disagree,” he says, “and believe that the majority of gamers who discontinue playing Zynga titles are likely to be non-payers, with payers spending more as they make a greater investment of time in each game.”

The average spending user on Facebook takes around 6-9 months before they begin purchasing Facebook credits, believes Pachter, meaning that while MAUs may peak and being to drop, revenues from a game can still grow.

Zynga is still the company with the largest social gaming audience on Facebook, he adds, with around five times as many MAUs as its next closest competitor, hence it should not be written off so easily. （source:gamasutra）

2）Unity 4 upgrades focus on triple-A, with a dash of web and mobile

by Frank Cifaldi

Unity Technologies has lifted the lid on the upcoming Unity 4, a major upgrade to the game development platform that currently claims over 1 million registered users.

The upgrade brings an increase in visual fidelity to Unity games, DirectX 11 support, an enhanced exporting option to Flash, a preview of game deployment to Linux, and more.

The biggest change Unity is touting for this latest release is the addition of Mecanim, a suite of animation tools the company acquired last year. Mecanim allows developers to create animation blend trees and state machines within Unity itself. We haven’t seen it ourselves yet, but over the phone Unity CEO David Helgason tells us that it’s “super high performance,” and that developers using it as part of a beta program have been impressed by its polished workflow.

“It solves a lot of things completely automatically, and figures out a lot of the beginning and end times, and how you group things, and so on,” he says.

“Copious amounts” of animations for Mecanim will be available in the Unity Asset Store on day one, Helgason tells us.

With DirectX support, Unity 4 games should see increased shader capabilities and smoother models and environments (via tessellation). The company says mobile platforms will also see a boost of fidelity thanks to new features and optimizations. Promised improvements include real-time shadows, skinned mesh instancing, normal map baking, and a refined GPU profiler.

The release also finally brings Flash deployment, introduced in beta form last year, to a fully functional release. It also adds a preview of deployment to desktop Linux machines.

Additional features to be available in Unity 4.0, according to a list provided to us by Unity, include:

•Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals and automatic culling

•3D texture support

•Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority

•Major optimizations in UnityGUI performance and memory usage

•Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup

•Remote Unity Web Player debugging

•New Project Window workflows

•Iterative lightmap baking

•Refined component-based workflows

•Extensible inspectors for custom classes

•Improved Cubemap import pipeline

•Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance savings

•Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry – render points & lines efficiently

•Search, live preview and buy Asset Store assets from the Project Window

Helgason says that upgrades and feature additions to Unity 4 should come at a quicker pace than they did for 3.

“Even with 8 or 9 releases in under two years…we feel like we haven’t been doing enough and actually want to speed up our releases. The goal is to only have a small handful of months between release dates.”

A release date for Unity 4 has not been set, though interested developers can pre-order it here. A demonstration of Unity 4 will take place at the Unite 2012 developer conference in Amsterdam this August. （source:gamasutra）

3）Why RockYou became a rewards-based games company [Interview]

by Joe Osborne

“There’s three ways that could get [California] out of bankruptcy. Tax weed, allow online gambling and tax it, and you know, do immigration reforms so that you tax illegals but let them stay here,” RockYou CEO Lisa Marino candidly tells us. Of course, there are more serious reasons why RockYou acquired Ryzing, the Philadelphia-based developer behind Bingo by Ryzing.

A while before this move, RockYou repositioned itself as a publisher no longer interested in developing games in-house. (And actually agreed to publish Ryzing’s game.) In short, the company decided to focus on its strengths, but it also wised up to where the industry was going. In the next two years, real-money gaming stands to be the next big thing on Facebook (with several caveats, of course).

To RockYou, Ryzing is already ahead of the pack in gearing up for the online casino renaissance. Bingo by Ryzing allows players to earn prizes through sweepstakes, a crafty little loophole through the strict U.S. regulations on online gambling. CEO Manu Gambhir is a 15-year veteran of the online gambling world in the UK, Marino tells us.

While RockYou now owns Bingo by Ryzing, what the company is most interested in is Ryzing’s experience and its rewards-based gaming approach. And RockYou looks to apply Ryzing’s rewards-based gaming platform to plenty more games and game types.

“When RockYou thinks about content in general, we don’t care whether we make it ourselves or we partner with third parties. We just want to be with really strong content,” Marino admits. “And so in the Ryzing model, they’re obviously working on a second game right now that was part of the acquisition as well.”

“But we also see these mechanics being applicable to lots of other games. I think there’s interest in the dynamics between like a crosswords type game. You know, KartWorld is a racing game where the sweepstakes type model could be very, very interesting,” Marino teases. “It’s just the variety of executions that these mechanics apply. But Ryzing tech is working on more titles for us as well even though we’ll be taking the platform out to third party partners we already work with.”

Ultimately, to Marino Ryzing and RockYou are simply a fine match. “At that point it’s a platform play which is the long bet for us, right? Because it’s super, super complimentary,” Marino says. “Rewards based game is incredibly complimentary to what we do.”（source:games）

4）Post Pedophile Scandal, Habbo Hotel Is Opening For Business Again

Ingrid Lunden

Sulake, the developers behind the children’s virtual world Habbo Hotel, is preparing to reopen its chatrooms once again after a week in which it was exposed for hosting inappropriate sexual content on the site, prompting the company to close down all conversations — “mute” them in Habbo terminology — while it sorted out the mess.

The news of what Habbo is calling “The Great Unmute” will also be used as a chance to get user feedback on the state of the site and how it should develop, according to a blog post published today by Sulake’s CEO, Paul LaFontaine. He also took the opportunity to claim that some journalists have been using the opportunity to start reaching out to Habbo users, offering them money for stories of their Habbo misadventures.

“They may well be vulnerable and certainly will not benefit from self-interested approaches and offers of cash for case studies,” he writes. “We want to create a comprehensive and constructive response to our current challenges and send out a call to action for improved safety standards across the online gaming community. Petty attempts to generate more bad news are distracting us from the job at hand.”

He also notes that some users have been holding silent candle-light vigils on the site while waiting for it to re-open. Some 60 percent of users on the site are registered to be between the ages of 13 and 16 — although as we pointed out when the story first emerged, it’s quite easy to write whatever age you want at registration.

LaFontaine says that the decision to “mute” all conversations on the site, which it took after the UK’s Channel Four broadcast its exposé on Tuesday, had a “massive business impact” on the site — financial amount not specified, but the company makes money off the sale of virtual goods. That would have been largely halted in the process of the part-closure, resulting in a revenue loss that would have been compounded by some users leaving the site altogether in the wake of the scandal.

Despite that, he writes, “the safety of our users is non-negotiable.”

He writes that since the scandal broke — which resulted in key investor Balderton dropping its 13 percent stake in the company — senior management and “world leading technologists” have been working in its Helsinki HQ to sort out the situation and put in place a new “comprehensive safety program.” Other sites aimed at children have taken a mixed approach to firming up their controls, however.

The details of that have not yet been made public but interestingly it looks like it will involve more parental involvement in the use of the site — something that was not required before. There may be (and should be) more algorithmic improvements made for non-human monitoring, too, however.

Habbo’s “Great Unmute”, in the words of LaFontaine, sounds slightly cultish, but if you go beyond cynicism it might be a worthwhile exercise: “It’s going to provide a chance for our users to create a conversational tidal wave, telling us what they want and showing the world that our global community contains millions of responsible and proud users who have a positive experience on our site,” he writes. He says that more details will come in the days ahead.（source:techcrunch）

5）Song Pop tops this week’s chart of fastest-growing Facebook games by MAU

Mike Thompson

FreshPlanet’s Song Pop took the top spot on this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users, up by 1.1 million MAU for a gain of 141 percent.

Chinese-language role-playing game【猛將無雙】★★★★★ 超人氣!你的朋友都在玩 (“[Reggie unparalleled】 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ super popular! Your friends are playing”) took the No. 2 spot, increasing by 22 percent with an increase of 135,927 MAU. SGN’s Jewels of the Amazon came in at No. 3 with 100,000 MAU, good for a nine percent gain. Manuel Otto’s Stick Run snagged the No. 4 position with 100,000 MAU, showing a relatively small increase of two percent in MAU. Finally, CrowdStar’s It Girl completes this week’s top five games on the list, also gaining 100,000  MAU for a two percent gain.

Aside from Song Pop, three other games this week had gains larger than 50 percent. BILD.de’s soccer game mein Klub was up by 50,000 MAU, a 500 percent gain that is likely due to the Euro Cup 2012. THQ’s UFC Undisputed Fight Nation brought in 30,000 MAU for a 50 percent increase — again probably because of several recent, high-profile UFC fights, as well as the recent announcement that Electronic Arts had acquired the video game rights to the franchise. Finally, IGG’s 泰坦戰爭-首款3D大型網遊,全新引擎,史詩大作,超震撼視覺感受,遊覽眾古文明!★★★★★ (“Titan war – the first 3D large-scale online games, new engine, epic masterpiece, super stunning visual feelings, to visit all the ancient civilizations! ★ ★ ★ ★ ★”) snagged 20,000 MAU for a 67 percent gain, likely due to cross-traffic from its recently-launched Facebook MMO Moonlight Online.

Clarification: Jellyvision Games’s trivia game You Don’t Know Jack didn’t appear on this list due to a classification error on AppData; it would have taken the No. 3 spot with 130,000 MAU for a 325 percent increase. The error’s been fixed and the game will show up on future charts.（source:insidesocialgames）